With rapid increases in network communications bandwidth, real-time visual communication transmissions of video are generally not restricted by bandwidth availability. However, computational costs (i.e., processor workloads) to encode different frames of video content typically vary. That is, as video frame content changes, so does computational requirements to encode the content. For instance, an early termination mechanism adopted in H.264 video encoding motion estimation (ME) operations results in varying computational costs to encode different frames of video data. This is potentially problematic, especially since availability of a processor's limited computational resources generally changes over time. When necessary computational resources are not available, it is often difficult to maintain a consistent frame encoding rate for real-time video transmission. Generally this causes computation overflow, dropped video frames, and the introduction of jitter (transmission delays) into a video stream, resulting in low-quality video playback.